Year: 2012

Google SEO RDFa and Semantic Search

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Today’s Wall Street Journal gives us an insight in to the makeover underway in the Google search department. Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page. They are going about this by developing the search engine [that] will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. The ‘amassing’ got a kick start …

Linked Data a Recipe for Food?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

What relevance does Linked Data have for a City’s food supply you may ask. “We live in a world where the agri-food supply chain, from producer all the way through to final consumer, is extremely inefficient in the flow of knowledge.. ..with the application of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies along the food supply chain, it will make it easier for all actors along there to know more about where their food comes from and where their food goes.”

Libraries Through the Linked Data Telescope

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Linked Data and Linked Open Data have arrived on the library agenda. The consequence of this rise interest in library Linked Data is that the community is now exploring and debating how to migrate library records from formats such as Marc into this new RDF. In my opinion there is a great danger here of getting bogged down in the detail of how to represent every scintilla of information from a library record in every linked data view.

Is Linked Data DIY a Good Idea?

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Most Semantic Web and Linked Data enthusiasts will tell you that Linked Data is not rocket science, and it is not.  They will tell you that RDF is one of the simplest data forms for describing things, and they are right.  They will tell you that adopting Linked Data makes merging disparate datasets much easier to do, and it does. They will say that publishing persistent globally addressable URIs (identifiers) for your things and concepts will make it easier for others to reference and share them, it will.  They will tell you that it will enable you to add value …

Free Data for 2.4 Million European Culture Heritage Items

Posted on by Richard Wallis

Europeana recently launched an excellent short animation explaining what Linked Open Data is and why it’s a good thing, both for users and for data providers.  They did this in support of the release of a large amount of Linked Open Data describing cultural heritage assets held in Libraries, Museums, Galleries and other institutions across Europe. The significant elements in the press release, from Europeana Professional (Europeana’s professional knowledge-sharing platform), are that they are releasing data for 2.4 million items, under a CC0 open data license, and it is Linked Data in RDF. This is a wonderful resource, and example …

A Data 7th Wave Approaching

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I believe Data, or more precisely changes in how we create, consume, and interact with data, has the potential to deliver a seventh wave impact. With the advent of many data associated advances, variously labelled Big Data, Social Networking, Open Data, Cloud Services, Linked Data, Microformats, Microdata, Semantic Web, Enterprise Data, it is now venturing beyond those closed systems into the wider world. It is precisely because these trends have been around for a while, and are starting to mature and influence each other, that they are building to form something really significant.

Step Back from the XML – RDF Modelling

Posted on by Richard Wallis

I have watched many flounder when they first try to get their head around describing the things they already know in this new Linked Data format, RDF. Just like moving house, we initially grasp for the familiar and that might not always be helpful. This is is where stepping back from the XML is a good idea. XML is only one encoding/transmission format for RDF